


We Will Be Like Sailors

by ConstanceComment



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Character(s) of Color, Families of Choice, Growing Up Together, Military Families, Multi, Mute Aleksis Kaidanovsky, Non-Linear Narrative, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, POV Alternating, Panic Attacks, Shock, Threesome - F/M/M, Wei Tang Clan - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-14
Updated: 2013-10-06
Packaged: 2017-12-24 02:24:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/934077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConstanceComment/pseuds/ConstanceComment
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mako, Chuck, and Raleigh signed up to fight dragons. This is not that story.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. We Are Not Traitors But The Lights Go Out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aglassfullofhappiness (Cedes)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cedes/gifts).



> I'm blaming everything on Cedes. She was the one who put my name in the tags when she reblogged something about a possible OT3. You don't speculate like that out loud and not expect me to show up and do something stupid, I mean honestly.
> 
> As far as for this fic's relationship with canon, I'm playing fast and loose with everything. I'm taking what suits me from the wiki, and extrapolating everything else.
> 
> The title and the chapter titles are coming out of Richard Siken's poem [Saying Your Names](http://www.fishousepoems.org/archives/richard_siken/saying_your_names.shtml).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gipsy Danger's name has been retconned to Lady Danger. I know she was named after a plane, but still. Racism! Not what PR is about. Apparently there's a movement to just quietly retcon her all over fandom, I approve very much.
> 
> Warnings: Mentions of and some description of rape and sexual assault later in the chapter.

Chuck meets Mako in Hong Kong when she is twelve, and he is thirteen. He has lost his mother. She has lost her entire family. Both their cities have been razed to the ground, and soon new ones will begin to grow above the ashes, New Sydney standing above an irradiated crater, New Tokyo over the graveyard of Onibaba in what will become the first of the boneslums. They are young, and not young, and they are very, very angry.

Someday, they are going to be dragonslayers.

“Wanna play tag?” Chuck asks her sullenly when their fathers inevitably shove them together, pawning the children off on each other while the adults try to reinforce the skeleton of the new world order.

Mako doesn’t speak English yet, not much. But she understands _play_ , and she understands _pain_ , and the syllabic difference that remains unuttered between them, like calling to like because that’s what it does.

Mako punches him when Chuck laughs at her for stumbling through the halls. Chuck trips her in the hallway to get revenge, and pulls her into a headlock. They go careening through the base like small tornadoes, and in this manner find the Wei Tang brothers, the three of them still training to be pilots. The brothers are young and not young, but still old enough to be impressive. They’re playing basketball, and like Mako, they do not speak English. Like Chuck, they do not speak Japanese. They manage to communicate, anyway, to turn the game to hide-and-seek, making the Shatterdome into the best of mazes ever devised, almost built for children’s foot races.

Mako and Chuck are found, eventually, when their fathers put out a general alert in the base, realizing that their children have been lost. The Wei Tang brothers find them huddling in a closet, tucked up under some cleaning equipment. Chuck kicks Hu in the shins, and Mako bolts as fast as she can drag her new friend behind her.

They are in so, _so_ much trouble when Cheung catches up to them, grabbing the squirming children, passing Mako to Jin to carry over his shoulder while he and Hu wrestle with Chuck, who is only six years their junior, and still very much a handful. Chuck is grounded. Mako, to her surprise and shame, is also grounded.

Chuck sneaks out to see her anyway before he and his father leave the base, and while Mako is horrified, on some level, that he would disrespect his father in such a way, Chuck has also smuggled her candy and there is a certain amount of insanity that can be forgiven for the sake of sugar flowers that melt on their tongues and drip sweet juices down their chins.

They are, in their own way, inseparable after that.

* * *

 

Raleigh Becket meets Stacker Pentecost long before he ever encounters Mako Mori.

The Marshall is imposing, and strong, and has just slightly too little patience for a young buck pilot with too much energy and a rather simplified worldview. Raleigh Becket, armed with his brother’s love and a shining, titanic suit of armor, still thinks that he’s going to fight dragons. Maybe rescue a princess, even.

This is not a story about that.

Raleigh Becket meets Mako Mori when she is twenty and he is twenty-seven. She speaks English now, and he knows Japanese, enough to meet the basic standards of decent human being in this perhaps most global community. Mako is impressed anyway, even though she knows that maybe she shouldn’t be. Neither of them have been young for a very long time.

“It’s good to meet you,” Raleigh says to her when she walks away.

“And you, as well,” she replies, and they spend the rest of the evening thinking about each other’s smile, and the things they could see in it.

* * *

 

When she is thirteen, Mako tries to enlist. Her father makes sure her application is rejected, and is mad at her, but not, because he always knew that this is what it was going to be.

Chuck, when he sees her next in Lima, is also mad.

Chuck knows some Japanese now, and Mako speaks English. A correspondence kept falteringly across the world’s bases has assured that they are learning odd military pidgin, and each other’s phone numbers. After racking up astronomical bills on international roaming calls, they made email accounts for the sole purposes of contacting each other, and used them well, despite the silly names they put on them, as is done by children experiencing what they believe to be technological autonomy.

“You enlisted without me?” Chuck hisses, trailing behind his father and his uncle.

“You weren’t with me at the time,” Mako replies, and isn’t sure why she’s surprised that this is what he’s angry about, not when everyone else has taken time to explain to her that “war is no place for a child.”

“Like hell,” Chuck spits. “No way you’re getting in before me, I’m not letting you leave me behind.”

“What do you propose then?” Mako snaps back, because out of everything that is contained in the multitudes of his still-shaping personality, one of the most outstanding qualities that Chuck Hansen possesses is his talent for being unlawfully irritating.

“Train with me,” Chuck says, like it’s obvious. “That way we do it together; you know we’re better than all them old farts—”

Chuck and Mako are both growing things, now, their gangly frames breaking out into spots and stretching in awkward ways that make it difficult to spar, or find staves that fit their heights. Chuck gets frustrated, Mako gets methodical. Together, they sort the whole rack, and take to the mat with barely any idea of what they’re doing, operating primarily on Chuck’s extrapolated knowledge of the way the pilots of Lucky Seven’s duel.

They leave covered in bruises, with new calluses starting to form on the insides of their palms. Chuck has a grin on his face that makes his father pause, later, when he sees it, to the point where Hercules has to doubletake. His brother asks him, later, what made him startle so.

“The last time I saw that smile,” he explains, somewhat wretchedly, because this is brother and his copilot and he in most ways already knows, “it was Angela’s—”

“Ah,” says his brother, and that is enough.

* * *

 

Raleigh never does get to save his princess.

His brother sleeps with one of them, though, for all that she wrote her number on Raleigh’s arm.

Predictably, they get into a fight. First with a simulated kaiju, an engagement that they lose because they are busy fighting with each other. Then, with their fists, because they’re Americans, because they’re brothers; there’s still an impulse after all these years to try and fix these misunderstandings with aggressive physicality. A good headlock and a swift kick to the shins should be enough, but it isn’t.

Marshall Pentecost verbally beats the shit out of them when he catches them. He’s sparing with his words; there is nothing about the man that is not economical in its purpose, its action, at least, not from what Raleigh has seen so far.

“You’re pilots now,” the Marshall seethes, glaring at Raleigh, who is still nineteen and thinks that he’s here to save the world but never expected to make it this far, “maybe you should act like it.”

* * *

 

Mako’s aunt Tamsin dies of cancer when she’s thirteen and Chuck is fourteen. Chuck knows, intellectually, that Mako grew up in the shadow of Coyote Tango the way he himself has lived with Lucky Seven. Even though his relationship with his family is, to understate things, rocky, the thought of losing his uncle makes Chuck feel ill.

Unfortunately, Chuck is in New Sydney when Tamsin dies, and Mako is in San Francisco. Chuck arranges by email to steal his father’s phone and for Mako to call him collect, and even though they talk forever, it’s still not enough. He wants to be able to hug her and let her know that it sucks that she’s losing her family again.

“You still have me,” he tells her, somewhat desperate, pressing the phone against his jaw as hard as he can because he wants to be sure she hears him. “You’ll always have me and—”

He means to say _and the triplets_ , but Mako interrupts him, voice all reedy and thin with a sad little “really?” She asks him, and Chuck hates, _hates_ that she sounds so small.

“Yeah, really, always, Mako, it’s— always—” he doesn’t realize until later, that that counts a promise.

* * *

 

It takes Mako awhile, to wrap her head around the idea that Marshall Pentecost is her father. It’s easier to think of him as the man who rescued her; her exposure to Disney frames him as a knight in shining armor, one that saved her from a demon, but that explanation holds a surprising lack of water. He’s the Marshall, he simply _is_ ; Mako feels that she could chart the stars by his position in relation to them.

He’s a warrior, he’s not a father; there’s a part of him that clearly doesn’t know how to be anything other than a tool anymore, to build and destroy. But in his own way, he loves her. Pentecost teaches her how to fight even though he does not intend to let her ride into battle.

This, eventually, is where Mako fits him. Pentecost is her mentor in arms; he is her sensei. With that position comes a measure of respect that is hard for others (at this point, Chuck, and later, Raleigh) to understand. If Pentecost told her to, Mako would jump out a window, trusting that he’ have a reason, and that he’d catch her in the end.

“There’s a military aspect to it,” she tries to tell Chuck when she is fourteen and he is fifteen, and they’re still not in the academy. “It’s about honor.”

Chuck doesn’t understand, but when it comes to fathers, there are a lot of things that Chuck doesn’t understand; consciously viewing his parent as teacher is one of these things.

* * *

 

Raleigh loses Yancy. It’s like losing half of his soul, and most of his childhood.

That is, in fact, not exactly what it’s like. That’s exactly what it _is_. There’s no “like” about it.

Having carried him there with all the intelligence of an AI too large for one person to contain, stained by the depth of two brothers’ love, Lady Danger crashes on a mostly abandoned beach outside of Anchorage. Raleigh stumbles from the wreckage of the things he learned to love most, his legs giving out from under him, his left arm a burning mass of pain that he can feel only from a distance, all the nerve endings half-disconnected, screaming loudly that they no longer exist, ripped off with the armor of his youth.

Raleigh Becket is young, and not young, and his home is safe, for now. He is twenty-two. In the west, they are building a wall. It’s not as hard as he thinks it should be to walk into the Shatterdome, collect his things and walk out.

It is easier than it should be, to not come back. He doesn’t even change his name. He just. Disappears.

* * *

 

Mako is fifteen and Chuck is sixteen and they make it into the academy together.

To their credit, their parents don’t even try to split them up. They just shuffle them together and in their own desperate way, _hope_.

Mako and Chuck fight their way through the academy mostly by fighting with each other. They grew up in a close proximity unhampered by physical distance; it’s surprising how much of their interactions are based on what the Wei Tang brothers fondly refer to as “bitching.”

Chuck and Mako are the shining stars of their graduating class, undergoing the majority of their training in Manila, where they add Filipino to the list of languages that they've learned. They push each other, the way they’ve always pushed each other, mostly by fighting and poking and needling, then wheeling on anyone else who tries to do the same.

Chuck loses six matches in a row to four different people because his footwork still isn’t up to par, he’s cocky as hell, and all the other recruits know that, ready to take the young teenaged upstart down a peg or twelve. Mako knocks him off his feet until he learns to jump her staff, or block it, or dodge it or _something_.

“Fight me like you haven’t already won,” she sneers at him, “or you’re just going to keep losing.”

Chuck kicks the shit out of his next three partners, and is written up for excessive use of force in combat simulation. He grins at Mako when he’s done getting a dressing down and she barely, just barely resists the urge to roll her eyes at him.

Despite her placid demeanor, Mako has always had a worse temper than Chuck. She holds herself tighter because of it; Stacker Pentecost is wary of that anger and his worry has raised Mako in fear, too. She holds her emotions inside herself because she can’t afford to let them out.

Like Chuck, she gets perfect grades, or nearly so in all of her classes because she refuses to do otherwise, but holds back in her matches even though she and Chuck both know that she’s more than capable of taking out anyone who tries to challenge her. Chuck calls her a coward, and taunts her and taunts her and aims well below the belt until Mako finally snaps, lashing out as hard as she can, launching herself across the room, aiming for Chuck’s eyes, to take them out with her fingers if she can.

They leave the room sporting a fractured wrist (Mako) and a somewhat severe concussion (Chuck) but they can’t bring themselves to feel too worked up about it.

They’re written up, of course. Their parents are informed. Mako cringes at the slight undertones of crushing disappointment radiating through the call that her father gives her. Chuck, on the other hand, revels completely in his father’s wearied disapproval, and is only disappointed that he was not more upset, that his ill behavior was met with resignation and not anger, fuelling only more teenaged resentment.

“Let’s do it again,” Chuck tells Mako, and the look she gives him says that he’s crazy.

“You’re concussed,” she points out, slowly.

“I can always be more concussed,” Chuck says, and this time Mako does hit him, socking him in the shoulder with her good hand, hard enough to sting but not enough to let a bruise show.

* * *

 

The Wall of Life is the dumbest idea that Raleigh has ever encountered. A wall. To keep out the kaiju. Because that’s _definitely_ going to work.

It’s wishful thinking, it’s all wishful thinking, but there’s a part of him that still believes in that, and well. He really does need a job.

Anchorage is a big city, now, for the Pacific, for the war. Easy enough to get lost in, but Raleigh’s famous, especially here, though less so without his brother. No one looks for pilots when they’re alone, but he still hates it, that flash of recognition when a potential employer sees his face, or hears his voice, or watches his motions scaled down from the size of a particularly mobile building. _Aren’t you_ , they say, and he says “no,” and runs, but doesn’t run.

He totally runs. Every single goddamn time.

Yancy kept telling him to take responsibility for his actions, but for all that’s he’s old he’s a child, still; Raleigh can’t stop running away. He’s constantly impressed by the instinctive need to find darkness and hide.

There are positions open at the top of the Wall. It’s dangerous work, that, but it’s better than his last job.

At least this time he’s getting hazard pay.

* * *

 

Chuck Hansen meets Raleigh Becket when he is sixteen and the American is twenty-one. Chuck is not out of the Academy yet, and Raleigh still unironically believes in fighting the good fight. They both speak English, but Raleigh is pretty much lost when it comes to Filipino, and spends most of his time in Manila being embarrassed even though most of the base speaks his language.

Covered in pimples and gangly as hell, Chuck bumps into him in the hallway. “The hangar is that way,” he directs the lost pilot when Raleigh tries to find his training session, voice tinged with a teenager’s hormonal acerbity.

“Thanks,” Raleigh says, completely and utterly distracted, not even really looking at Chuck in his haste to find his way to where he needs to be.

Of course, Raleigh doesn’t remember it, later. Chuck, too, more or less forgets about it; Manila is memorable for being the cause of his uncle’s emotional breakdown and subsequent sabbatical, not because of the lost American pilot he ran into while he was there.

Chuck Hansen meets Raleigh Becket when he is twenty-one and the American is twenty-seven. Raleigh has finally learned Spanish. Chuck purposefully mispronounces his name, and insults him, just to see what happens.

On Chuck’s part, it’s a fair amount of posturing. On Raleigh’s part, it’s a fair amount of irritation, and the decision to summarily ignore Chuck for as long as he can get away with once Chuck leans in and starts commenting on Yancy.

“Herc Hansen,” he says warmly, “good to see you again, man. Sorry about your brother,” he adds, after a moment.

Herc shrugs. “Sorry about yours.”

Raleigh locks up just a bit when he hears the words, the casual apology, and _ah_ , Chuck thinks, he can use this.

* * *

 

Mako and Chuck are the shining stars of their graduating class. She is the youngest recruit to ever enlist, and in her quiet way, Mako lords this over Chuck for pretty much the rest of forever.

How the hell they managed to get out of training without drifting, they never know for sure. They’re both pretty sure it was the Marshall.

“Your dad’s nuts,” Chuck tells her. “It’s not right for him to keep babying you like this; we’re rangers now, he can take the kid gloves off—”

“Chuck,” Mako says primly, and that’s, well, that’s technically a warning, one that includes the unspoken phrase _I don’t talk shit about you and your dad, so leave me and mine the fuck out of this_ , one that Chuck is thankfully smart enough to listen to.

Chuck is the first one to pilot a jaeger. His uncle quits the PPDC after the massacre at Manila, citing emotional trauma after the loss of Horizon Brave in the fight against a category IV. Lucky Seven knew Horizon Brave; Lo Hin Shen and Xichi Po were the triplets’ mentors, they played poker with Chuck’s family whenever they were all in Hong Kong. Po was always the dealer and Shen was the one who taught Chuck how to play.

Something in Chuck is screaming and wants to call the man weak for giving up like this, for letting Lucky Seven and everything she ever meant to them and their family just fall apart in the hangar, for letting their friends’ sacrifice mean nothing. Then Chuck stops and looks at his uncle, really looks at him.

Physically unharmed, Chuck’s uncle didn’t even have to visit the infirmary after the battle. But there’s something in his eyes, shadows around the edges of his whole body, a tightness that follows him when he walks, carrying himself at once too loose and carefully, as if his skin had suddenly become a permeable barrier and he was trying not to spill out of it.

Chuck’s seen Mako look like that before, when she doesn’t think anyone’s watching her. This was never a joke, but it’s more real now than it would have been, otherwise.

“I’m sorry, little guy,” his uncle says hoarsely when Chuck catches him packing in the bunker that their family has shared in half a dozen bases for half as many years. “It wasn’t my decision— your father’s kicking me out,” Scott laughs, bitterly. “Talk to the Marshall if you want to know more,” he laughs again, his mouth twisting unpleasantly downwards. “Hell, ask your dad— he’s the one with the inside knowledge, after all.”

On the loudspeaker, there’s a request for Cadet Hansen to report to the Marshall’s office.

Chuck wants to shout at him; like any of them really thought they were getting out alive?

* * *

 

It turns out that building a wall is weirdly therapeutic.

After a while, Raleigh starts to feel marginally less dead inside. With repeated use his arm because less use-less. Eventually, he gets his hand-eye coordination up to something approaching par, and really, nobody wants to be above par, Raleigh’s pretty sure that’s not exactly a win condition in golf, not that he actually knows anything about golf.

Furthermore, he doesn’t fall off the Wall. They lose another five guys in the next four weeks, and a few people are reporting frostbite damage. Raleigh gets down at the end of every day with all his fingers and toes, and with a paycheck, too.

He’s counting that as win. It’s a hollow victory. He needs something to keep in his Spartan apartment; it’s starting to get full of his regrets, and that’s probably some sort of health code violation. At the very least, it’s seriously unhealthy.

He buys a houseplant. It dies in the cold when the building’s heater breaks, but while it lasts it makes the room brighter, and makes enough of a difference for Raleigh to stop thinking in awkward metaphors pertaining only to the winter and the sea.

He’s smiling the next day when he goes to work, and puts in a mail order for a baby cactus, because Xichi Po talked to him once about having a few when he and Yancy met him in Manila. Raleigh is amused by the whimsy of it, trying to keep a desert plant alive in Alaska.

Surprisingly, the thing actually stays alive. Raleigh gets his hands covered in itchy spikes, and the cactus grows arms like gangbusters when the sun basically stops setting, but it’s completely worth it, being able to go home to something that is as impossible as he is in terms of survival.

His coworkers are starting to think that Raleigh is nuts. Not that he cares; turnover is high, and it’s not exactly like he disagrees with them. He hasn’t been completely sane for what feels like a long time now.

* * *

 

This is when they stop being Mako and Chuck.

Mako is fifteen and Chuck is sixteen, it being the end of the six month period where he’s only got a numerical year and a height advantage on her. He’s coming out of her father’s office and his uncle is leaving Manila and the PPDC as a whole. Mako’s wearing her aunt Tamsin’s pilot’s jacket, which she’s finally starting to grow into, even if it’s always going to be too wide at the shoulders. Mako has brought with her some sugar flowers that the triplets gave her the last time she was in Hong Kong, a present from the three of them for their erstwhile little cousins. She wants to do something for Chuck, because she knows that this has to be killing him, to lose his uncle like this after the loss of Horizon Brave in the last attack.

Chuck comes out of her father’s room and looks the way he does after he’s been punched in the sternum.

Mako holds out the candy, the little white paper bag crinkling in her outstretched hand. “I brought these for you,” she says.

Chuck doesn’t move, at first. He stares at her, wild-eyed, rooted in place. Mako’s never seen a deer, but she understands the phrase _deer in headlights_ , the muffled panic trying to pound its way out from behind his closed mouth.

“I’m sorry about your uncle,” she tells him quietly, not lowering her arm as Chuck flinches minutely at the words.

Her plan, at this point, is to take him to the hangar and watch the crews make repairs to Lucky Seven, to Lady Danger. The recovery of Horizon Brave and her subsequent transfer to Oblivion Bay will take longer, and she thinks it will be good to watch the surviving jaegers grow again, rebuilt by the hands of men and women.

“They’re decommissioning Lucky,” Chuck replies hoarsely, like he can’t believe it. “Her hip joint’s ruined and they’re not sure they can fix it—” he swallows.

Mako’s heart clenches. “Oh, Chuck.”

“I’m not—” he starts, grinding his teeth. “Mako I’m being promoted,” he spits out.

“What?” Mako asks him.

Mako’s ears fill with the roar of blood; it’s hard for her to see, her vision filled with colorless stars. Now it’s her turn to stare uncomprehendingly and Chuck doesn’t take her bafflement with grace.

He fidgets. “They’re decommissioning Lucky— but her engine’s still good, they’re putting her in the line new line, Mark V, right, they don’t have a name yet—”

“Chuck—” Mako still has her hand out. She hasn’t thought to move it.

“I get it, okay?” He says harshly. “I know, it was always supposed to be you and me and now they’re putting me with my _dad_ , I don’t even _like_ my dad why the hell are they doing this — I don’t want—”

“Chuck!” Mako barks. He freezes. “Don’t,” she chokes, shutting her eyes tight, “how _dare_ you throw this away because of me, don’t you get what you’ve just been given? I just —”

“Mako,” Chuck tries, reaching for her, and she shakes her head at, her hair flying into her face.

“No, don’t you— you do not get to argue with me!” She snaps pulling her hand back, clenching her fist by her side. “You,” she seethes, “you look at me and you go and get in the robot, ranger Hansen, you have a job to do—”

Chuck nods, slowly, and if she could see it, Mako would understand the expression on his face, the one that says he’s having his intestines pulled out and shown to him. He reaches for her, but doesn’t touch, his hand hovering in the space that’s sprung up between them, larger than continents had ever been.

When Mako opens her eyes again, Chuck has let his hand drop, silently, and left. His shoes on the floor sound like jaeger footfalls.

Mako goes to watch the repair of Lady Danger alone, her candies crushed into fragments and grainy powder. She hunches her shoulders in, crying, trying not to, and wonders if this is what it feels like to be slowly set on fire, or to drown.

* * *

 

Raleigh doesn’t meet Mako in Manila. They miss each other by inches, all the space it takes for Danger’s freight elevator door to close, one taking her up while the other’s taking him down. Mako’s leaving Chuck and Raleigh’s going to meet Yancy.

He catches sight of her boot when he turns around, watching the door slide shut on her side as he steps out of the pilots’ lift, but that’s it. He doesn’t focus; it’s a small detail, not worth remembering.

She’s off on her way to Vladivostok the next day and when Danger is done being repaired, Raleigh will follow her and Yancy back home to Anchorage, waiting to come home to the winter and the ice.

* * *

 

Drifting isn’t what Chuck thinks it’s going to be.

He grew up in a family of pilots, he’s heard, over and over that there’s no real way to describe the drift. He has heard, also, that the drift does things to a jaeger’s AI, that the imprint of two human minds is enough to mark one, make it _something_ other than metal pretending to be flesh.

 _When pilots dream_ , people say, _when pilots dream, their jaegers move, too. They dream of fighting._

Chuck can believe that; he does too.

When they lose Lucky Seven, on the heels of Horizon Brave, of her pilots, of Chuck’s uncle Scott, there’s a part of Chuck that caves in, under the pain of it. The sheer weight of the burden he feel s falling onto his shoulders in the instant before he can square them.

The point of piloting is so that you don’t have to do it alone. But Scott is gone and Mako’s still in Manila and he’s in New Sydney and Chuck’s never felt so lost.

Lucky is decommissioned, and her skeleton becomes Eureka, a process that feels like the slow decline of a terminal illness more than the rebirth of a phoenix. Chuck watches her fall apart and build back up, nothing at all like herself, the shattered hip joint impeding the stance. They give Eureka wings. She’s not going to fly, but she’s got wings like she could, maybe, or else they’re just like Romeo Blue’s ridiculous torso fins. Chuck assumes that they’re for speed, for stability, but there’s nothing that feels stable about this.

It takes them three months to build Eureka. Chuck is sixteen throughout, young and not young, feeling too small for his skin in the face technological marvel that has replaced his childhood jaeger and tried to make him into his uncle.

One of the worst things about stepping into the neural handshake with his father, is that he learns that he doesn’t hate him. His father sees Angela every time he looks at Chuck and inevitably thinks of making his choice because it’s what she would have wanted, because it’s what parents _do_. Chuck feels his father’s various guilts and regrets and hates to know that neither of them are sure whether or not Chuck counts in that category.

Further, Chuck sees the truth about his uncle Scott.

Herc tries to hide it for a while; it takes about five minutes into their systems test for it to come out. Considering that even ten seconds is enough to get someone’s whole life story when you’re in their head, that sort of withholding takes an insane amount of fortitude. Or else a father’s need to keep something dangerous from his son.

Third-hand, Chuck feels his uncle assault a woman. She’s drunk and Scott’s having fun, and maybe this wasn’t the best plan, to take a drunk girl home, she might throw up when they’re done, and she won’t stop crying, but she won’t remember in the morning, anyway—

With all the strength entailed in his name, Hercules throws his son clear of the drift, and locks the jaeger down until Chuck stops throwing up, helping him get free of his suddenly disgusting helmet. It’s the last time Chuck lets his father hold him.

Chuck drifts, and Chuck drifts, and he thinks about Mako and emails to the Vladivostok winter, thinks of his uncle, run off to whatever hell will hold him. For the first time in a long time, he wishes that Cheung were around; Chuck wants a familiar face that looks nothing like his, and he misses his cousins, he misses the family that doesn’t come with the failings of his blood.

Chuck dreams, and dreams of water and the melt of spring, and feels more than he hears an old and somewhat familiar voice saying _you don’t belong to me, and you never will_.

Chuck wakes up and feels alone.

But he often feels alone these days. Never mind that he’s got a dog, and his father sleeps in the bunk across the room. There’s practically an ocean of silence between them, and the only people Chuck would want to talk to live on different continents.

* * *

 

Mako goes to Vladivostok.

On the way there, she calls the Wei brothers and thanks them for the candy, and tells them that she misses them. Hu splutters and pretends that he’s too old to want the regard of a fifteen year old girl, but Cheung smiles at her through the phone; “we miss you too, Mako.”

Cheung hands the phone to Hu. He asks her to say hello to the Kaidonovskys for him when she meets them. “You’re going to like Sasha,” Hu says knowingly, and Mako can hear him grinning mischievously at her even a continent away.

Jin asks her about the academy, how long it will be until she graduates. Mako doesn’t know the answer to that question. “Soon,” she says, and hates that she knows that she’s lying.

“We’ll come out for your graduation!” Jin enthuses. “Mako, that’s wonderful!”

Mako’s heart aches and her stomach twists. She feels like she wants to cry. “Did you hear?” She asks them, and registers her own voice as if from far away. “Chuck’s going to be a pilot.”

“Yeah, we know,” Jin says gently. “We’re very proud, all of us. But how do you feel?” He asks, and Mako doesn’t know the answer to that question either. _Jealous_ , she thinks, _and hurt, too._

“Me too,” she lies, very quietly. “I’m— I’m proud of him, Jin.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, this chapter was edited a bit to reflect the addition of Scott Hansen and all of his baggage to the story. As such, the publication date was altered. Sorry about that.


	2. Called Out Across The Water

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Scott Hansen was added to the story after all. As such, the publication date of this chapter and the chapter previous has changed.

Chuck gets a call from the Wei Tang brothers when he’s in the last days of sixteen just before he drives Striker Eureka for the first time.

“Hey, little cousin!” Hu enthuses when Chuck picks up. “Heard all about your victory!”

“I haven’t killed anything yet,” Chuck points out, mulish.

“That’s not what matters,” Hu tells him. “We’re proud of you either way, you know?” He fakes a sniff. “My little cousin’s all grown up—”

Someone steals the phone from Hu. “Chuck?”

“Hi Cheung,” Chuck smiles weakly, and can’t help himself. Cheung’s concern has always been recognizable.

“We got a call from Mako,” Cheung says softly, and Chuck’s heart eats itself.

“Yeah?” Chuck prods him hoarsely, and tries not to panic, imagining fire, flood. A meteor strike, some act of god. A kaiju attack. “And how’s she doing?”

There’s a long pause on the other end of the line. Chuck can hear Cheung breathing, and he wants to kill someone.

“She’s fine,” Cheung eventually says. He used to be a street brawler and only escaped being a Triad member by the skin of his teeth. How the hell he got so bad at lying, Chuck will never know. But he doesn’t push the issue.

“That’s— that’s good,” is all he says on that front. “I’m sorry about Horizon Brave,” he adds quietly.

There’s another pause, and the click as Cheung puts him on speaker. “We miss them, too,” Cheung says, sounding only a little like he’s had his liver shown to him recently.

“It’s okay, though,” Hu adds after a moment. “They died doing what they signed up for; they went out fighting. Everything goes away,” he finishes, and Chuck’s heart can’t take this sort of stress. He’s too young to have any sort of arrhythmia; it shouldn’t be beating so hard, or so painfully.

 _Even you?_ He wants to ask.

He already thinks he’d know the answer, though. _Even us_ , Hu would say. His voice would sound like Mako’s quiet anger.

* * *

 

Mako goes to Vladivostok, and spends a year and half there. She learns enough Russian to find the train station, her father, and the bathroom. Outside of that, it’s a handful of swears courtesy of Cherno Alpha’s mechanical team, how to ask what someone’s name is, and _“no, the beef borscht, not the beef tongue, please.”_

Sasha Kaidonovsky is the queen of the Shatterdome. Her hair is bleached so blonde it’s pretty much white, white like the snow, white like the electricity that pours off Cherno Alpha’s fists. On every one of her fingers, she has a ring or two, obscenely large and very heavy. When she gets excited, Sasha rubs her hands together and the rings go _clink_ as they collide. She used to be a prizefighter back in Moscow, a champion in the underground bareknuckled circuit. Mako understands why the triplets like her; they’ve always been excited by other people who can “really fight, not the shit they teach you in the academy.”

Sasha is the most impressive woman that Mako has ever met. Outside of Tamsin, Dr. Lightcap, and the pilots of Nova Hyperion, Sasha is the first female pilot that Mako has ever encountered, and she wears her status with something like pride, maybe a little bit like resentment.

“Most of us are Mark I,” Sasha tells her in Mandarin when Mako asks why that is. “We got in when everyone was still panicking; there were not a lot of options, then, and the PPDC took whoever they could get,” Sasha smiles wolfishly. “Later, they got picky. Discriminating. They had the room to choose, and as always, women are unstable.”

Behind her, Aleksis frowns, scowling. He reaches out a hand for Sasha and she takes it, their rings a noisy declaration of intent. Mako knew about Aleksis Kaidonovsky before she came to Vladivostok. His name is on a few papers about drift theory; he’s a technical genius, one who knows the inside of Cherno Alpha better than most of her mechanics, and yet she’s never seen him speak. It takes Mako two weeks to understand that Aleksis isn’t taciturn, but mute. He communicates with his wife via residual drifting and over a decade of acquaintance. When that doesn’t cover everything, he fingerspells, or writes on paper what his mouth cannot express. Sasha technically speaks for him, but he has a way of making his opinions known.

Everything about them is loud as loud; Aleksis’s mismatched beard and hair. Sasha’s blood-colored lipstick. Their rings and necklaces and rings. Every step they take is accompanied by the clanking of metal; neither of them are ever silent, or easily ignored.

“You have to understand,” Sasha tells Mako seriously. “This is important; they’re not going to turn around and need you if you hide. What you need to do, is make yourself valuable. You have to make yourself noticeable,” she shares a look with Aleksis, one with too many teeth and a very long history. “You have to make yourself loud.”

This is the story of how Mako dyes her hair. She is seventeen when she leaves Valdivostok, and she is still tougher than she looks.

* * *

 

Chuck is twenty and he’s been a pilot three years, and he hasn’t seen Mako for about as long, though Striker’s deployments in Hong Kong have allowed him to see the Wei Tang brothers with some sort of regularity. But it’s not often and he’s lonely and it hurts. He doesn’t know what to do with that, at first. So he compensates. Ironically, he does so by taking a page out of her book.

Everything goes into the war. All his anger, all his hurt. He’s amazing, damn it, he worked too hard and too long to ruin this for himself because he can’t get his head out of his ass. Chuck knows his father feels just as lost when it comes to his missing brother. Scott bolted when he left; no way to contact them, and Herc’s vague sense of residual drifting is the only thing that lets them know he hasn’t died yet. Neither of them are sure how they feel about that; now that Chuck can see it through his father’s eyes instead of filtered through his own admiration of the man, he knows that Scott was always a narcissist, always something of an asshole. Chuck knows that his father doesn’t mean to see Scott and Angela when he looks at Chuck, but he’s standing in their places; Herc carries with him every person he’s ever loved, and Chuck has always been so very much the epitome of his family.

Chuck drifts, and he learns, eventually, that the reason why he’s with his father because Herc was the only person that they felt comfortable putting Chuck with. And not because the man is his father, but rather in spite of it. Hercules Hansen is the miracle man; he can drift with anyone. Even the brother he couldn’t hate despite everything, even the son he barely understands. Chuck can see as much even when he’s not doing so through his father’s eyes. Chuck’s with his dad for a reason, and he begins to wonder if they separated him and Mako out of a fear of her, or of him. They need him, but.

There’s always a ‘but.’

Chuck works his ass off and by his third year as a pilot, he’s killed six kaiju. He’s fought more than that, but there’s only ever one finishing blow, and he supposes that he can let the rest of New Sydney’s garrison, and in one notable case, Korea’s Nova Hyperion, share the credit occasionally.

Chuck doesn’t write to Mako. Mako doesn’t write to him. Somehow, they’re never in the same base together. The PPDC’s big but it’s getting smaller, and the world has never been that large. Whenever the Marshall visits New Sydney, he inevitably does so when Striker Eureka is deployed elsewhere, trailing his daughter behind him.

Chuck has always been bitter. But it wasn’t— it was never like this. Mako was the closest person he’s ever had in life and now she’s avoiding him and _she’s avoiding him_ , what the hell—

Mako Mori might not always stand her ground, but the last time she ran away from Chuck, they were playing hide and seek and this is _killing him_.

But he can handle himself. War’s no place for children. He’s been a pilot for three years; it’s about time he acts like one.

* * *

 

New Tokyo is nothing like old Tokyo, which Mako hesitates to call home. Home has been something she carries around with her since she was twelve. This series of boneslums and low-squatting buildings doesn’t feel like home at all, only what it is; a new city in urban decay, only the government seeking to invest in something so close to the edge of destruction, and even then only halfheartedly. The new heart of Japan is somewhere else; most of Tokyo is leveled, and never stopped being flat, afterwards.

Taking advice from a good friend, Mako makes herself necessary. She becomes her father’s right hand, and more than that. His is a job that is largely administrative; she hates to think of it in these terms, but Mako effectively becomes his secretary. She doesn’t file, or anything like that, but she keeps tabs on everyone, on everything. She has a mind like a steel trap and she’s damn well going to use it.

Mako memorizes lists of personnel on every base; who are the rising stars? Who needs to be watched for? Along the way, her father entrusts her with what is perhaps the most unpleasant, but most crucial job that needs to be done in the PPDC: downsizing.

Because they are _shrinking by the year_. Ever since the Wall plan went into effect, they’ve been hemorrhaging funding. The bureaucrats are building a ring of rebar and concrete around the Pacific ocean, and Mako’s not sure who’s more pathetic, the politicos for believing it will work, or them, for not being able to stop it.

Mako Mori is nineteen and in four years, she’s made herself just about indispensable to the war effort. She signs her name at the bottom of vitally important documents and tries to offer what other jobs she can to the people she fires, writing recommendations for men and women continents away and lives with the knowledge that for some of them, that won’t be enough.

Mako makes the tough decisions every day. She realizes quickly that this is her father trying to teach her a lesson, to give her the knowledge of what it feels like to hold the futures of others in her hands. How to make the necessary choices about the potential of those around her, and those she’s never met. Mako thinks that maybe she’s learned the wrong thing, though. Her new work only makes her wonder; if he wasn’t going to use her where she was best, why keep her at all?

Four and half years out of the academy, Stiker Eureka’s name comes across her desk. She’s nineteen, but she feels tiny for the first time in years, because this is a choice she thought she’d never have to make twice.

Listed on the schematics is a broken hip joint; it’s not Lucky Seven’s, but it’s significant all the same. For a moment, Mako puts the pen down, and her head in her hands. Then she picks herself up, and swallows down the angry, panicked lump inside her throat that she refuses to choke on. This is a test, she knows it, but when she passes the folder to her father with the order of execution stamped on the front in damning letter, Mako realizes that it’s one she may have failed.

* * *

 

Raleigh loses track of the fatalities on the Wall. He does the hardest work, and by now, he’s done it the longest. Five years at the top; it’s a feat.

It’s a deathwish, say his coworkers, but Raleigh thinks that so very far from the truth. He saves money. Buys a less shit apartment, installs himself as far away from his childhood home as he can get without leaving Anchorage entirely. Takes his cactus with him. Buys another.

In the meantime, he watches the news. The world is ending and he feels like he’s just waiting for it. They’re shutting down the jaeger program every time he turns around.

“Ranger Raleigh Becket?” Asks a familiar voice. _Fuck_ , Raleigh thinks.

Raleigh burrows into his coat and pretends to be a hobo. “Wrong guy,” he says gruffly, and hopes his scarf muffles his voice. “Try someone else.”

“There’s no one else left. We could use men like you,” the Marshall tells him, and Raleigh thinks, _fuck_ , because even if he’s not a knight, there are still dragons, and damn if Pentecost hasn’t always known how to turn somebody’s screws when he needs to.

“When do we leave?” Raleigh asks him, and Pentecost gestures to the helicopter.

 _Fuck_ , Raleigh thinks again, emphatically.

He wonders if he’ll have time to go back for his cactus. Part of him wonders what the Marshall would do if he asked.

* * *

Eureka is one of five jaegers left anywhere in the world when everything comes crashing down. This is not a metaphor.

There’s a category IV howling at the door, and Striker Eureka is told to sit the battle out, never mind that they’ve lost over a dozen jaegers in the last year to kaiju of the same class. Striker’s in the middle stages of being decommissioned, disassembled. She’s old news, now, just like the rest of the program. They’re all going down, one after another. It just happens to be Striker’s turn this time, the last going first.

Despite this executive decision, the kaiju are coming faster now, almost in the grandest tactical “fuck you” that the blue bastards could think of. It’s weeks, tops, between attacks, nothing like the months they used to get between incursions.

This is the beginning of the end, and everybody knows it.

Chuck threatens everyone he has to threaten to get Striker out on the water. Herc calls in every favor he has left after so long piloting, and then some. Never mind that Striker’s missing some of her plates, never mind that she’s almost structurally unsound; the point is that she can still fight, and there is no way that the Wall is going to do anything to stop a category IV, no matter what the bureaucrats who paid for it say.

Vulcan Specter and Echo Saber, who as a New Tokyo Jaeger shouldn’t even have been there, die screaming.

Striker leaps into battle remembering her dead, wings trailing out behind her as she screams her fury in a twenty-one gun salute right into the kaiju’s plated face. The Miracle Mile isn’t kept; Mutavore pushes them all the way into the city. There’s no time to spare wondering if anyone made it to the shelters. Whoever’s caught on the streets has to damn well take their chances at this point; Striker’s busy fighting for her life.

When the battle’s over, they’ve put Mutavore through a building, and Striker’s left leg is nearly ruined. The only reason why she’s still standing at all, the only reason why her pilots are still alive, is because before Echo Saber went down, she used her blade like a pry board to rip open the damn thing’s chest cavity. From that wound and countless others, Mutavore’s blue blood sinks into the ground and takes with it another piece of Australia. Sydney as seen from above is nothing so much as a series of craters, from which rise pillars of steel, the testament to mankind’s unkillable stubborn need to expand.

The reporters ask them, later, the drift slowly, slowly leaching from their minds, how it was they won the fight.

As best he knows it, Chuck tells the truth:

“We won because we were better,” he sneers. “We lived, and they didn’t. You saw the Wall come down— we’re going to need all the good pilots we can get. Only the great get to pilot. And only the best get to stay that way.”

* * *

 

The first time Ms. Mako Mori meets Ranger Chuck Hansen, he is twenty-one and she is twenty, it being the middle of the sixth month period where he only has a numerical year and a jaeger on her.

He holds himself differently now. Five years is a long time; Chuck’s taller than her now by more than a few inches, and all his acne has cleared. His limbs are finally the right length for his body, and Mako realizes that she can’t read him at all. There’s something in his spine that’s finally straightened out of its offensive stance, more of a parade rest now than a perpetual readiness to spring. He no longer looks like he’s just waiting to throw the first punch, and it surprises Mako that she can’t tell whether or not she’s only imagining that she can still see familiar anger underneath his skin.

It reminds her of going to New Tokyo for the first time, visiting the district where her old apartment had been destroyed, the shanty complex that had grown up in its place. The streets were the same but the atmosphere was different, and everything familiar was alien, suddenly, the lapse in time making the change seem clean and more jarring than it should be.

Chuck has gotten arrogant. Or rather he always was and Mako never noticed it. It never mattered before, but now it is among the first things to come to mind about her childhood friend and the first of them to stick with her when the rest of his details she’s managed to shake off.

She doesn’t say anything to him, and he doesn’t say anything to her. There’s something in his expression that she used to understand, but Mako can’t see it now, and she tells herself that she doesn’t care. She thinks, walking away in disgust and faint disappointment, that this is what she saved herself from.

* * *

 

The first time Raleigh spars with Mako, he feels like he’s dancing. Forget the Marshall and his ideas of a dialogue; Raleigh feels as if he’s composing a symphony, moving in time with her perfectly.

Step, thrust, parry, block, block, block, thrust, kick— Raleigh throws out and arm to meet her, pointing his staff at her neck only to find she has hers levered against his stomach.

“Best of three?” He asks her, impulsively.

Mako smiles at him, fleetingly, her eyes going sharp with the expression until the Marshall calls “enough!” and they go wide because Raleigh has a hand on her shoulder announcing that _she_ is his pilot, as sure of this choice as he’s ever been of anything.

Busy looking at the Marshall’s livid face, Raleigh misses the expression Mako gives him. But if he saw it, he’d have recognized it as the face someone makes just before they have their intestines handed to them, the incredulous wariness that’s waiting for the other shoe, or looking for the catch.

* * *

 

Here’s the thing: Chuck’s not really expecting an emotional reunion. He is, at most, hoping they can work together as professionals. But even that seems beyond them; he walks right up to her, and he can’t even open his mouth past all the obscenities he wants to shout, all the desperate questions he’d want to ask if he wasn’t so afraid of being weak. Not that Mako spoke either. Mostly, she just stared, and the look on her suddenly adult face had been disturbingly impenetrable, a blank wall framed by two blue curtains.

Chuck gets the message that they’re going to Hong Kong from his father; the Marshall himself, apparently, has invited them. Chuck makes sure not to ask about her— it’s been five years and he’s an adult now, he’s done thinking about her and what they could have been every time he steps into his drivesuit. It had been worth it, at first, to feel his father’s resignation at being rejected, but it only hurt them both, that way, and Chuck would like to be done with sabotaging himself.

Chuck and Herc are transferred to Hong Kong two days after Mutavore goes down, taking Vulcan Specter and Echo Saber with it.

When he steps off the helicopter, the first place he goes is to the hangar. It’s been a long time since he saw any of the Wei brothers in person, and he wants to visit his erstwhile cousins.

As soon as he sets foot in the room, Chuck spots Jin making a beeline in his direction. Instead of stopping to talk to Chuck, he bends down and says hello to Max, chattering at the dog in Mandarin.

“What has he been feeding you? You’re all skin!” Jin exclaims, letting the bulldog lick at his face and bark happily.

Out of the corner of his eye, Chuck sees Mako, talking to the two Russians whose names he thinks he knows, pilots he hasn’t introduced himself to yet, though their jaeger’s name proceeds them. She looks happy. There’s a part of him that wants to be glad that she’s made friends, but the rest of him is only _angry_ , nearly incandescent in his rage that she would choose this, all of this, over him.

With her, too, is someone it takes him a moment to recognize, but when he does, it’s like getting punched in the head. Lady Danger is _alive_? Because that’s — he’d bet all the money he barely has on that being Raleigh Becket she’s laughing-not-laughing with, and he had been ninety-percent sure that Becket had died sometime in the five years it’s been since he disappeared at the end of the jaeger’s golden age.

The next thing Chuck knows, Hu has him in a headlock. “Cousin!” He says in excited Mandarin. “How’s it feel to be back? The others will never admit it but we missed you-”

Cheung whacks his brother in the head, and extends a hand for Chuck. “How are you doing?” He asks more seriously, casually stepping into Chuck’s line of sight.

“I’m doing fine, Cheung,” Chuck says, irritated. “I’m fine, okay?”

Cheung obviously doesn’t believe him given the quirk to his brows, one that Hu is quick to match, but he lets it go. “You need to eat more,” is what he says instead, “and feed your damn dog, Max looks like a skeleton.”

“Max is fine and you’ve never had a dog,” Chuck counters automatically. Cheung grins at him, and Chuck allows himself to be distracted, ignoring as best he can the heavy music playing from across the hangar bay.

* * *

 

See, the interesting thing is, Chuck doesn’t take offense to him until Raleigh mentions that he was in construction. That he helped to build the Wall.

It’s odd, Raleigh thinks, that Chuck would immediately hate him like that, that he’d be so quick to find something to latch on to, to dislike so thoroughly. He’ll learn, later, that it was due to Wall-related budgeting concerns that his jaeger was decommissioned. He will learn, later, that this hate is impersonal, that this hate is shallow as much as it is deep; a fitting description of Chuck Hansen if ever there was one.

But, when they meet, Raleigh is twenty-seven and Chuck is twenty-one. They’re both children, right now, in their own ways, but there’s something old to them, too, something worse than twenty-plus years should have seen. They deserved to live in worlds where war was a foreign concept; unfortunately for the both of them, they had signed up to fight dragons.

Raleigh meets Chuck and it’s like seeing what he could have been, what, in all fairness, he probably was, if without the rage issues. Chuck is talented and ambitious and Raleigh can respect that. He is also stunningly attractive, and Raleigh can appreciate that, too. What he’s realized is that Chuck Hansen is not out to get him, specifically. Rather, it’s more like he’s out to get _everyone_ ; Raleigh just happens to have earned his ire in particular.

Later, he will learn that not even that is true. But that’s to get ahead of things; right now, Raleigh has a jaeger, lovingly resurrected from the dead by a woman who has decided that his name sounds like _hope_. Chuck has Striker Eureka, walking on Lucky Seven’s last legs, and a childhood full of a disappointments that he uses like armor, and is getting tired of carrying.

 _I could make something here_ , Raleigh thinks to himself as he puts down his no-longer baby cactus in his Hong-Kong bunk. Full of people he could know and people he had known, maybe this won’t be a place he has to run from.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Speaking some more about things I'm making up; Sasha's speech about isms and exclusion is something that travis Beacham says is totally non-canon. And that's fricking great. Like all kinds of wow, yes, excellent. But at the same time, I wonder if that would really happen in a military organization without serious obstacles; there's always someone signing the paperwork, and occasionally, that someone is a douchebag. Anyway, I'll just take my cynicism somewhere else. If you want, think of it along the lines that most of the female pilots in the Shatterdomes that Mako's been to (which has been like, five, tops, in this story, out of the whole bunch that presumably exist) have already died.
> 
> Hey, hey, you know what you should go look at? Cedes made me a gorgeous [(and somewhat NSFW) picspam](http://aglassfullofhappiness.tumblr.com/post/59911484412/post-war-domestic-chuck-x-mako-x-raleigh-for). Seriously. It's a postwar look at the OT3 in a world where Chuck survived and they all moved to New Zealand to farm alpacas. This may or may not be thing that I've been viciously headcanoning with her lately.


	3. Sinking To The Sound

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry that took so long. College is hard. But I think I've figured out my schedule now. Though I may be taking a bit of a backseat on this in order to work on an original project.

Raleigh Becket is nineteen the first time he sees his jaeger. She’s big, and beautiful, and her heart is a creation of spun gold and moving parts, a whirlpool of light and heat and potential. Raleigh looks at her and his breath hitches, stunned by the engineering that she contains, the strength of her arms and the promise in her shoulders that makes him think of his favorite planes even though he knows she’s not built to fly. She’s got something in there under her body that makes him think of freedom, and the sort of heroes that used to take to the sky.

“Well that looks dangerous,” Yancy remarks to Tendo Choi while Raleigh is still staring up at the jaeger.

“She,” Raleigh corrects him faintly, not so much as taking an eye off the gleaming vision before him. “She’s a lady— it’s a she.”

Yancy gives him a weird look for that, but all Tendo asks is: “Got any ideas for a name yet?”

Tendo Choi is one of Yancy’s friends, Yancy having always been the one among the Becket brothers more likely to make friends in strange places. And for all that Anchorage is home, and they were both raised through a childhood of travel, the Shatterdome is still the most foreign place they’ve ever been. But Raleigh likes it here, or at least, he thinks that he could learn to. The walls here are cold, but they keep the winter out, and moreso, the Shatterdome has _her_.

“We get to name her?” Raleigh breathes, turning at last to look at the technician.

Tendo smiles at him, the warm sort of look that people usually give to Yancy Becket’s kid brother. “It’s tradition,” Tendo explains patiently. “The pilots always name their jaegers; some people like to think it’s the start of the AI’s lifespan, receiving a name from the people who drive her.”

“Is that true?” Yancy asks, looking somewhat concerned. “Just how alive are these things?”

Tendo shrugs. “Nobody’s really sure. There’s superstition about it, sure, especially around the older jaegers. The newborns are usually pretty dormant; normal. But the older ones? Even when they’re empty they’ve got personality. Dr. Lightcap has some theories, you can ask her when Brawler Yukon gets back from San Francisco.”

“Creepy,” Yancy remarks, and follows Tendo through the hangar. “You coming, kiddo?” He calls, and Raleigh shakes his head.

“I want to get a better look at her,” he explains, already headed towards the enormous, unnamed beauty of a machine.

 _I want to know her better_ , Raleigh thinks, and he’s a kid again; he’s falling in love.

* * *

Mako signs Striker Eureka’s death warrant and earns her father’s disappointment for it. Guilt sits heavily in her gut for weeks, making her meals taste wrong and her heart ache. She tells herself firmly that these feelings are irrational; Striker Eureka is damaged, and the program simply can’t support subpar jaegers anymore. Not that Striker is subpar, not that her pilots were ever anything other than frighteningly competent—

The story of Mako’s life so far has been one of making the best out of whatever’s left. Realizing that is what sends her to Oblivion Bay.

The law of salvage is an old maritime tradition; if you can find it and dredge it up, it’s yours. And Mako’s just about ready for something that she can keep. She enlists Tendo in her project because he knows how jaegers work better than most technicians, having a broader general knowledge of the machines after so many years commanding them, and she understands that someone’s going to have to teach her what she needs to know. Her determination and her deep understanding of what the PPDC’s budget can and cannot handle will do the rest.

With the right sort of friends and the wrong sort of deals, they can fix Striker Eureka. They can even resurrect the dead. All it’s going to take is a little bit of money, and a staggering amount of faith. Miracles don’t come from nowhere, after all.

It takes three months to put everything underway. Through the brothers Wei and their invaluable gang connections, Stacker Pentecost makes a deal with Hannibal Chau, and subsequently, Mako is provided with the cash that she will need.

Mako Mori is nineteen the first time she sees her jaeger. Her frame is mostly rusted, and one of her arms is missing, but there’s something in the still-proud stance carried in her shoulders that looks something like hope. Her name is Lady Danger, and Mako loves her for the grace in her body that even death couldn’t stamp out.

* * *

After he drifts with his father for the first time, Chuck is left with the knowledge of what it meant to make that most impossible choice, and his father’s guilt-panic-love-panic-guilt-resolve is still shuddering around in him, rattling the bones in chest, making him far too aware of the softer things they were made to protect. He is, quite resolutely, not thinking about Scott.

The disaster of that first drift leaves the Shatterdome is constricting and wrong, every maze-like corridor no longer home, no longer safe. Chuck flees because he can but doesn’t call it that; hell, he doesn’t call it anything, he just runs, pulling on his new, as-of-yet-emblemless pilot’s jacket one arm at a time and taking off. When he was younger, he had one with Lucky Seven’s logo on it, but he’s since then gotten too big for it, his adolescent shoulders growing too wide for its child-sized seams.

New Sydney is a city of craters, only a little bit more than half the size of its predecessor. Some of Scissure’s bones still lie in the outskirts, what’s left of Garigal park standing as an irradiated monument to the dead they were never able to find bodies for. Somewhere out in the ash that used to be people and trees is Chuck’s mother; there’s a mass monument for the dead at the edge of the safe zone, but he’s never been to see it. He decides that maybe, it’s about time he did.

Chuck gets to the monument on foot, unheeding of the fact that wandering the city alone is a terrible idea when all the pacific cities are mostly slum by the year 2020. He hasn’t had real street smarts at any point in his life being so much of a military brat, and it’s pathetically lucky that he doesn’t get attacked. Maybe it’s that the monument stands in the only “good part” of New Sydney that’s left is what keeps him safe, right in the middle of what used to be her wealthy district before the rich moved out towards the country’s insides. Whatever the case, Chuck finds himself there as the day’s light dies in a wash of fire, staring up at the massive pillar, a blood-red obelisk of polished stone, names carved bone white into the thing’s many geometrical faces. Chuck wants to know who the hell designed this; the colors are uncomfortably like blood and bone, and all it does is serve to remind them so viscerally of the bodies that were lost when the bombs returned them all to dust.

By the time Chuck finds his mother’s name, his eyes are starting to hurt from the strain of scouring the massive installation, his neck aching from craning it skyward to look as far he could up the monument’s faces.

Angela Hansen’s name is innocuously recorded on the monument’s northeast side, thrown into shadow along with her son as the sun sets on the monument’s other side. Chuck traces his hand over the white lettering, letting his fingers press heavily against a polished stone that does not yield. Looking hard but seeing nothing, he realizes that he does not quite remember the details of his mother’s face.

On his way back from the monument, Chuck is lost in his own thoughts, and his father’s, trying angrily to find anything of his mother’s that he could’ve been left.

* * *

Raleigh doesn’t think that he can get away from Tendo for very long. Hong Kong is a big city and the case can be made that world’s last Shatterdomes is merely a smaller one, but Tendo Choi is the sort of man who’s friendly with everyone, who knows the whereabouts of every soul in his domain. That is, after all, why he was made LOCCENT chief in every Shatterdome he is stationed in as a matter out of hand. His technical skills are unmatched, of course, but it’s the personal touch that earns him his keep, that little extra personified by his bowties, his suspenders, the rosary wrapped around his wrist to offset his pompadour.

Raleigh’s still surprised, anyway, when Tendo corners him one afternoon in the mess hall. He’d have thought, stupidly, it seems, that he’d be given space now that he’s back. Raleigh had gotten used to being alone, not that he’d really enjoyed it, in fact he’d hated solitude with every fiber of his being, but still, it is amazing what one can become accustomed to.

“You know, I don’t think I can get away with calling you kiddo anymore,” is what Tendo says when he sits down at Raleigh’s table with a mug marked _‘world’s best dad’_. “You got old, Becket boy.”

Raleigh raises an eyebrow. “ _I_ got old? Someone told me you and Allison finally had a _kid_.”

Tendo grins at him, already digging for his wallet. “Her name’s Stella. I’ve got pictures if you want to see them.”

Raleigh smiles, shakes his head. “Don’t worry about it; I’m sure she’s adorable. Probably has your hair.”

“Nah, she’s still hanging around that bald phase of newborn. But the odds are good.”

For a moment, silence lingers. It’s companionable enough, but still vaguely awkward; Tendo always was closer to Yancy, and his absence is something Raleigh’s gotten used to carrying around. Lady Danger is still gorgeous after all these years, and it’s easier for him to contemplate her than it is to try and make smalltalk with Tendo when Raleigh knows that he’s just waiting to ask the question that’s been a long time coming.

Eventually, it comes out. “What did you do for all of those years, Rals?” Tendo asks, looking intently at Raleigh, who doesn’t even try to hold his gaze.

Raleigh takes a second before answering, trying to gather his thoughts. “I built things,” he says after a moment, remembering the way the younger Hansen had snarled at him for that answer.

Tendo lets the thought sink in, saying nothing, taking a slow drink from his coffee mug. “Did it help?” He asks, and there’s something almost plaintive in his tone of voice.

Raleigh looks up at his jaeger, her body whole, her visor repaired. Five years and it’s like all the wounds have gone away, leaving nothing behind, not even the scars. His brother’s best friend is sitting right next to him, close enough that Raleigh can remember the way that Yancy used to feel about him, the affection and the easy happiness of shooting the shit with an interesting person. It hurts much less than he thought it would.

“Yeah,” Raleigh says slowly, wondering at the resurrection he has found himself involved in. “Yeah, you know what, I think it did.”

* * *

Mako’s father hands her a shoe, and the first thing she does is hug him, surprising them both with the contact.

“Thank you,” she says into his neatly-pressed shirt. After a moment, her father relaxes and puts his arms around her. Physical affection isn’t usual to the but this is the right moment for it— Mako wishes she knew how to tell him that she doesn’t intend to fail him.

After that, the second thing Mako does is go talk to Aleksis and Sasha.

“What if I can’t do it?” She asks them, when the celebration is done, when Aleksis has put her down and the three of them have demolished their way through a significant amount of one of the engineers’ homebrew moonshines, a prize Aleksis had won at one of the base’s monthly poker tournaments.

“You will do it,” Sasha assures her, when Mako is scared and just a little drunk, young and not young. “You are a fighter down where it matters in you. You’re either going to do this or you’ll die. I doubt that after all this time, you'd let yourself fail.”

“No,” Mako says, making herself stick to English, “but what if do anyway?”

Aleksis shakes his head, turning his body so that Mako can see his hands, large and worn. _‘If you fail,’_ he signs, Sasha translating, _‘you will try again.’_

“What if they won’t let me?”

Sasha grins, and relays: _‘You will make them.’_

* * *

The first thing that Raleigh notices, upon stepping into the prep phase of testing, is that like Danger, the suits have been painted differently, shifting from white to black. The change is tasteful; Raleigh’s pretty certain that it was done to avoid any sort of triggers— but that’s not exactly a thought worth following.

Picking the thing up, all Raleigh can think is of is how drastically technology has changed. The new suit is actually something more like actual battle armor than the hard plastic shell it used to be. The old drivesuits had to literally be screwed on; this new one slips on like real clothes, if real clothes were lined with lead and weighed about as much due to requisite radiation shielding.

Accordingly, when Raleigh is helped into his suit, he’s given a dose of metharocin. Lady is, apparently, still more than mildly hazardous to be standing too close to. New paint job or not, her heart is still basically an exposed nuclear reactor.

In some ways, it’s nice to know that not that much has changed. This is really what makes Raleigh stop and take stock of his life, that the imminent threat of non-incidental radiation poisoning is what makes him think of home for the first time in five years. Somewhere along the way he went from a kid in love with planes to punching giant monsters in the face while wearing a giant robot.

 _Life never ceases to surprise_ , Raleigh thinks to himself, and when Mako steps into the chamber, already gleaming in her new polished drivesuit, he smiles, because sometimes, the surprise can be a nice one.

Mako smiles back and it’s just this edge of tentative, but there’s something in her eyes that reminds him of the way Dr. Lightcap used to straighten her spine before Yukon Brawler took off, something that says she’s more than ready to fight.

“Are you ready?” She asks him, and wonders if that’s for her benefit or his, though he can’t quite grasp the words to articulate that thought.

His heart feels like it’s too big for his chest. “Don’t chase the RABIT,” is what he tells her instead, and internally, curses himself for not having anything better to say.

* * *

Chuck goes to LOCCENT to watch the testing. Becket might be a washout, but he’s back in the program regardless; Chuck feels like he might as well see what he’s been saddled with, at this point. Maybe the construction worker will surprise him, but he doubts it. Other than mysteriously rising from the dead with a refurbished jaeger (that being worse than anything else) waiting for him, Becket hasn’t appeared to be anything special. Chuck had gone to the training session, had seen the way he fought, the way he moved with Mako like he was just barely keeping up with her. Chuck had caught her eye on the way out, but she hadn’t looked at him for long; her father was calling her back, and back- Lady Danger wasn’t going to be her jaeger, after all. He hadn’t known whether to be disappointed or pleased.

Accordingly, Chuck is just as blindsided as Raleigh when Mako steps into the Conn-Pod.

For a moment, his heart forgets how to beat. It moves painfully about his chest as it attempts to relearn, angrily battering itself against the walls presented in Chuck’s ribs, but for a moment all he can hear is blood, all he can see is Mako’s outstretched hand in a metal corridor somewhere in the Manila Shatterdome—

“Chuck,” his father says gruffly, and he’s present again. Grounded. Like a live wire, or a particularly unruly child. Having seen the inside of his head, Chuck knows that his father would describe him with both phrases.

Chuck reminds himself to breathe.

He makes it all the way through the initialization. He listens to Becket talking Mako slowly through the first stages of the drift, watches Choi announce that they are steady and holding. Out of the corner of his eye, Chuck watches the Marshall, and knows that his father will be doing the same, though more obviously, a fact that adds itself to the list of things Chuck never wanted to know about his father but learned anyway thanks to the drift.

Throughout it all, Chuck takes one breath after the other, reminds himself that it’s been five years and roughly a fourth of their lifetimes since he and Mako last spoke. They’re completely different people by now; they have to be. He’s not sure if he tells himself that in order to prove that she’s ready, or to justify why she isn’t. He doesn’t even know whether he wants her to succeed, or fail, only that it matters, somehow, one way or the other. Chuck’s never been introspective, and he doesn’t plan to start being so now.

The Marshall is called out of the room by a very winded German; someone from the last dregs of the K-Science division, it seems. Apparently something has gone very wrong in the labs, and Pentecost is needed right away. Wordlessly, he hands command to Chuck’s father, nodding at Herc and making some last protestations on behalf of Mako’s importance to him before he leaves, letting his daughter fend for herself.

This is, of course, when every machine in the room starts screaming.

* * *

This is when they become Raleigh and Mako.

Raleigh settles in behind Mako’s breastbone like he was always supposed to have been there, a fact that startles both of them. Because it undoubtedly is a fact; they are both radiating anxiety and determination in equal measures, and the surprise over that is what propels them to their first shared laughter, the unspoken moment where they’re both thinking: _I hope they like me._

From there, the same-ness, the home-feeling, that only intensifies.

A childhood of travel, where everything felt foreign. The need to be stronger, to do better, to prove themselves worthy and maybe save the world. The people they love, have loved, continue to be in love with, even now. The people they have lost, the mistakes that they have made, and the things they would do to fix them.

The half-articulated thought that stretches out between what fraction remains of the divide:

_You too?_

Then, Raleigh looks to the right, wanting to share this laughter, this discovery with the brother he can still half-feel in Lady Danger’s wires. There is no one standing at the shoulder, and Raleigh remembers the reason why.

Mako reaches for Raleigh the instant he starts to run away. He’s falling and she tries to catch him, but all she does is lose balance herself, trailing Raleigh into a world of wind and snow, falling down past that into a place of warped iron and shattered glass. Further, so falls Lady, and her grief is his grief is Mako’s grief. They are losing the things they have lost, and will always be losing, in a world of ice and noise and monsters the size of mountains.

 _Mako_ , Raleigh says, reaching for her. His worry is a living thing, but his panic is suddenly under tight control. “Mako you have to listen to me.”

But she can’t. Mako is a child again, she is terrified. There is a monster that is hunting her, one that she needs to kill.

Outside their bodies, Lady Danger raises her cannon. The way her heart spins and whines as she powers up is almost like a war cry.

* * *

Chuck is the first to move once the warnings start to go off. Even before the lights start flashing, he’s going, mobile, forced out of the parade rest he had made himself stand in lest he tense up and punch someone.

Tendo is screaming-not-screaming at the technicians and Chuck’s dad is yelling for everyone to evacuate LOCCENT, but Chuck can barely hear any of that, his head the same sort of quiet it gets filled with when he’s fighting, the certainty that comes with knowing he could die. Without thinking he crosses to the main panel and kneels down, wrapping both hands around the thick electrical cord as he tries to detach Danger from the control room, to make her manually power down. He forces all his weight into the pull, rocking back on his heels, throwing all his mass into the tug, not caring if he bruises his ass in the fall. But the thing is stuck tight, and Chuck is left pulling ineffectually, picturing the fire and the flood and the whole of LOCCENT turning to nothing but slag and ash.

It only takes Chuck’s father a moment before he’s there with him, and his hands are still larger than Chuck’s even though the two of them have been close to the same height for years. Chuck has always managed to feel small next to his father but it’s almost an advantage now, the way that between the two of them they are finally enough to leverage themselves against Lady Danger and her hold on her pilots, or their exertion on her.

Whoever decided to keep the weapons live in the first run between two people with significant trauma should be taken out behind the Shatterdome and tossed into the fucking bay. Chuck knows it was probably the Marshall, and he doesn’t even care. The man’s technically his superior and Chuck still wants to throw him the toxic ocean.

 _“Mako you have to listen to me,”_ an American voice is saying over the radio connection. _“Mako you’re safe you have to listen to me, trust me, we’re safe, it’s okay, we’re safe—”_

The cord comes loose, and LOCCENT loses contact with Lady Danger. The lit cannon is still aimed right at all of their heads.

“Status,” Chuck’s father barks.

Tendo runs a hand through is pompadour, upsetting the hairdo as he sucks air though his teeth before hissing it out again. “We’re out of power.”

“And?” Chuck prods him, wishing he could pull at his own hair himself.

“Mori’s still down there,” Tendo replies. “Raleigh’s trying to pull her out but according to our readings before they went offline, they were way out of sync towards the end. You should leave,” Tendo says after a beat. “Everyone’s evacuated; you two are next.”

“We’ll go when you go,” Chuck’s father bites back, and Tendo nods, grimly, staring at the jaeger facing them through the window.

Chuck’s head is full of blood and static, but down past where words have failed him all he can think is _I’m not leaving her again_.

* * *

Mako comes out of the drift and knows that she has failed. That fact sits somewhere heavy in her stomach, sick and rotting. She’s shaking and disturbed and something is very wrong with her heartbeat, her throat feels thick, she’s hyperventilating-

“Breathe, Mako,” Raleigh is saying to her, and she can’t feel him touching her through two layers of hard plastic, but she feels the faintest imprint of his hands, the places where she knows he wants to touch her. Mako catches flashes of his worry, his affection, his guilt at triggering her.

He helps her take her helmet off and keeps talking to her, phrases that are repetitive and almost nonsense, plastic covered hands skating along her plastic covered body in an attempt to reassure. Raleigh takes off his own helmet and breathes deep, with purpose; unconsciously, Mako begins to mimic him.

“I can still feel you,” she grinds out after a moment, her jaw locked, her teeth chattering; she’s almost certainly in shock. She feels cold down to her bones as if she never left the winter.

Raleigh nods, and doesn’t stop trying to touch her, though he avoids her now-uncovered skin. “That’s ghost drifting,” he tells her. “It goes away after a while.”

 _But what if I don’t want it to_ , Mako wants to say. She doesn’t; it feels too much for a man she’s only just met, but she’s been inside his head now, she knows everything, now—

Mako Mori is twenty, and her latest failure is killing her. Retread grief and survivor’s guilt both hers and not someone else’s are sitting like a lump of meat in her stomach, and she wants to vomit from it, the smells of dirt snow and charred metal. But behind her breastbone too is Raleigh Becket, age twenty-seven, warm and rough, edges smoothed by the wind.

* * *

Raleigh takes Mako’s to see Danger after they get out of the Conn-Pod. Raleigh had seen Mako’s affection for the Lady, bright and humming before he tripped them both into the worst of her memories by way of his own. There had been something brilliant about Mako when she thought about Lady, something quick and sharp and nothing like this heavy indrawn girl who sits beside him. Mako Mori is a competent woman, Raleigh knows, and he wants to know her better, not just what he had seen in the drift, which though it covers much, does not cover everything.

“Tell me about yourself,” Raleigh urges her, resting back on his elbows as they watch Lady Danger’s heart spin circles from the catwalk. Even after all these years, it’s still the same as staring into the sun.

Mako is quiet for a moment, thinking something through. Raleigh follows the thought by the movements in her face; it’s almost startling to see how expressive she is, how open. Maybe it’s her reopened wounds or the ghost drift, but Raleigh can read her like an open book. He wonders if she can do the same with him, and thinks that maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, if someone could see him like that. If Mako could.

“My father used to make swords,” is all Mako says, when she decides to speak.

“And what do you make?” Raleigh asks, because he’s seen the calluses on her fingers, watched the way she held that clipboard like it mattered, how she looks around a room like she’s counting heads and not searching for an exit.

The corner of Mako’s mouth quirks up into a grin, something quick and fast and deadly. “Mostly? The tough decisions.”

Raleigh nods, but continues. “Yeah, but what do you _build_ ,” he presses her, because Raleigh mostly hasn’t, made the tough decisions, that is, he builds walls and hiding places and shields out of good intentions, and he looks at Mako, thinking: _what is it that you do with hands like that, with a stare like that?_

“Jaegers,” Mako tells him, looking up at the scaffold where Danger is waiting for them. “I build jaegers.”


End file.
